It’s not every day that you get to experience a whole new color, and yet: scientists recently viewed an entirely new color by firing lasers to manipulate individual cone cells. No, really!

Most of us don’t have precise eye-lasers at home, but luckily there’s a workaround to approximate the effect. A biological cheat code, if you will.

This blog post over at dynomight.net features an animation you can stare at for a bit and, eventually, you might see the new mystery color. It works pretty reliably for me, and it is kind of wild. My brain doesn’t expect a screen to be able to produce such a saturated color.

You might describe the color as a sort of HDR cyan, but luckily the authors of the paper gave it a much better name: olo.

Olo! To quote the paper, “olo lies beyond the gamut.”

Why do we hallucinate this specific color?

M cones are most sensitive to 535 nm light, while L cones are most sensitive to 560 nm light. But M cones are still stimulated quite a lot by 560 nm light—around 80% of maximum. This means you never (normally) get to experience having just one type of cone firing.

Because M and L cones overlap in the wavelength of light they capture, we don’t get to see the full range of either cone without lasers or mind tricks. Kinda like that myth about not being able to use 100% of our brain power, but in this case: cone power.